PHILADELPHIA — Baseball’s uncertain future briefly hung over the otherwise grandiose MLB All-Star festivities on Tuesday morning as the league’s commissioner and the head of its players union detailed the divide over a potential salary cap.

A significant gap remains between the MLB owners, who are fighting to impose a cap once the current collective bargaining agreement expires in December, and the MLB Players Association, which staunchly rejects one.

MLB recently began airing “Level the Field” ads to promote public support for a cap, which interim MLBPA head Bruce Meyer took issue with.

“I have watched, over the last few years, the owners, the commissioner’s office, try to convince fans, the consumers of their product, that the product is broken,” Meyer said in downtown Philadelphia, not far from Citizens Bank Park, the site of Tuesday night’s All-Star Game.

“The supposed stewards of the game have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to convince those same fans that they don’t have hope, or they shouldn’t have hope, or that the product that they’re paying to consume in record numbers is somehow broken. I think it’s perverse.”

MLB attendance is up by 1.2% from this time last year, and 2026 is on track to finish as the league’s best-drawing season since 2017.

The Milwaukee Brewers, who play in baseball’s smallest market, finished with an MLB-best 97 wins last season. The Brewers and the Tampa Bay Rays, who also play in one of the sport’s smallest markets, are two of the top three teams in baseball this season.

But the owners, whom MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred represents, argue a salary cap would improve competitive balance in a league in which the deep-pocketed Los Angeles Dodgers have won back-to-back World Series.

The Dodgers — the only team better than Milwaukee and Tampa Bay this year — have an MLB-high $419.8 million payroll, including the competitive-balance tax, per Cot’s Contracts.

The Miami Marlins have the lowest payroll at $85.1 million.

“It defies human experience to ask a fan to think that the bottom end of that gap has the same opportunity to win as the top,” Manfred said Tuesday at a separate media availability, shortly after Meyer spoke.

“There is no question, OK, that everybody in any sport is not going to win once every 30 or 32 years, depending on how many teams you have. But the data in our sport is stark. Your opportunity to make the playoffs if you are a larger-market team is dramatically higher, and your opportunity to proceed to the subsequent rounds, that advantage grows with each round.”

In May, the MLB owners officially proposed a salary cap for the first time since 1994 — a year in which the negotiations fractured to the point of a season-ending strike that lasted more than seven months.

Nobody wants to repeat that history, but even with the current popularity and profitability of baseball on the line, neither the owners nor the union appear close to relenting.

“The best way to lose momentum is to stand still,” Manfred said.

“We’re doing exactly the same thing that we did with the rule changes [such as the pitch clock and ABS]. We’re listening to our fans. What our fans in a number of our markets are telling us — better than half of them — is there’s a lack of competitive balance in the game, and everything that we proposed is directed at addressing that fan concern.”

The MLBPA has vowed to never agree to a salary cap, with Meyer saying Tuesday that the other three major North American sports leagues — all of which have a cap — “lost most, if not all, of their leverage” under that system and have never been able to get out of it.

“If [the MLB owners] were so concerned about the fans, they would listen to the fans all across baseball who are literally chanting, ‘Sell the team,’ that want the owners to sell the team, because they feel they’re not competing,” Meyer said. “They don’t listen to that part.”

Trump’s take

President Trump has said he believes MLB needs a salary cap, but Manfred on Tuesday declined to speculate about whether Trump might intervene in the sport’s CBA negotiations.

“He is a great sports fan, and he is really knowledgeable about the business of sports, so it doesn’t surprise me that he’s interested,” Manfred said. “But beyond that, I’m going to pass.”

Olympic hurdles

There is momentum for MLB players to participate in the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, but it’s not a done deal yet.

One of the hurdles is a potential mandate that would require the MLB players to participate in the tournament that July — which would serve as a departure from the spring-based World Baseball Classic, where there is no such requirement.

“The schedule for the Olympics is going to cover days that players otherwise would be playing in major-league games,” Manfred said Tuesday.

“We saw it as a unique opportunity to market the sport with our very, very best players. It is a disruptive undertaking for us. Put money to one side. You’re disrupting your entire season, and if we’re gonna undertake that effort, we want our very best out there so people see how great our game really is.”

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